Producer–scrounger foraging games in starlings: a test of rate-maximizing and risk-sensitive models

Social foragers obtain food through two tactics: ‘producer’ searches for its food, and ‘scrounger’ exploits food discovered by producer. In the recent literature, two alternative producer–scrounger (P-S) models have been proposed, one rate-maximizing, the other risk-sensitive. Their predictions differ about the effect of food clump density on the equilibrium proportional use of scrounger in a group. The rate-maximizing model predicts no effect, …